1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processor and an information processing method for managing electronic information by providing the electronic information with its related data, or metadata, and to a computer-readable recording medium on which a program for causing a computer to execute the image processing method is recorded.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computers spread rapidly, it has become common to store a document, which is conventionally stored by filing paper, as electronic information.
For example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 11-25113 discloses an information processor that recognizes and extracts an image region including an image and a character region including a character string from a document containing diagrams, tables, images such as photographs, and character strings; stores the extracted image as a search object; and facilitates a search for the stored image using the extracted characters (character string) as a text for search.
Such an information processor can retrieve necessary information from among a large amount of electronic information.
In the above-described information processor, not only a document but also individual images and texts forming the document are also stored as electronic information.
It is a common practice to provide, for example, electronic information as described above with its related data, or metadata. Provision of metadata to the electronic information facilitates its management. There is, however, a problem in that the editing of the metadata is time-consuming because it should be performed item by item manually by a user.